SUMMARY
This drama glosses over the severity of mental illness by presenting it as something momentary that you can get over in a minute. It overestimates a mentally ill persons abilities to recover from it and it never encourages medical or professional help as it never recognizes suicidal tendencies as part of a severe illness in the first place.

It's unaware of the different diagnosis it's presenting symptoms of which becomes a problem as it treats every case similarly. Insult the person and tell them to become stronger, give them a near death experience, encourage them with words and then the person is cured and will never try to commit suicide again. An extremely damaging and unrealistic approach to encourage people to use on suicidal or suffering individuals. Even if the approach would consist of only positive encouragement, the writers are still not recognizing that this needs medical attention once the person has survived their first suicide attempt.

This drama was created to spread awareness and lower the stigma around mental health issues but instead, what this drama is basically doing is encouraging and validating the toxic out look Korean people have on mental illness and invalidating the suffering and trauma, individuals had to go through to become suicidal.

I also don't understand the writers choice to encourage traumatizing or destroying the "bullies" lives as a punishment for their actions. A study shows that the most likely reason a person becomes a bully is because they have been deprived of a safe space and are suffering from severe trauma or stress. This is a very important detail the show could have brought up. No matter what choices you made in life, if you're suffering from mental illness you should be offered help. Considering that the bully went on to become a public figure, someone who has constant pressure, stress and hate directed at them daily, they're probably in a really bad mental state already and has now, for sure, become more likely to develop suicidal thoughts because of the RM team. Very counter productive for a team that is supposed to lower Koreas suicide rate. This also means that they're spreading a message that you deserve to suffer if I believe you're a bad person even if you too, are a victim of mental illness.


LONG REVIEW
Korea carries one of the worlds highest suicide rates in the world.

Why?

To name only a few reasons; The Korean society was built to perfectly mimic survival of the fittest. Escaping the bottom of the pyramid is nearly impossible and accidentally sliding off the top is a daily risk. People are expected from an early age to become number one at everything but in a country of roughly 52 million people, only one can become number one and everyone else has to fight for the left over money the top 1% hasn't pocketed yet. Being valued at such a surfaced level, the fear, the stress and the pressure is a sure way to cause mental deterioration, so how do people deal with it?

Frankly speaking, they don't.

In Korea, mental illness is not being taken as seriously as it should and a lot of people don't understand what it entails. It's misrepresented in the media too often and constantly associated with insanity, weakness or danger. It's highly stigmatized, looked down upon and going to therapy to get help is still a taboo.

And this drama embodied that toxic mentality perfectly.

The job of the Risk management team is to find suicidal individuals, figure out why they are suicidal and then convince them not to end themselves. And although this drama does a great job with presenting traumatic events, trauma, PTSD and depression it doesn't know that it's doing it and that's a problem. It's a problem because the solution presented to solve the issue at hand minimizes the severity of the situation and enforces the toxic mentality that so many Koreans have when it comes to mental illness. "Just change your attitude and you'll be fine".

Sadly, that's not how it works.

If a person is considering suicide, it's not an impulse thought. In most cases, people have to go through an immense amount of pain and suffering before the thought of not existing enters their mind. And then the thought of not existing becomes comforting. Once it's comforting it usually stays just a thought for most people. "I don't want to exist. I want to die. But I wont." For a person to be pushed beyond this, it takes a lot of additional torment. The comfort of not existing encourages a curiosity in how one could leave this world and then these option make a plan. Lastly, the plan is executed and that's it.

So why does suicide become an option?
It's not because of self pity and it's not because life after death is expectedly better. If a person chooses suicide it's most likely because this person has suffered enough depression that their mental state has been completely reprogrammed into feeling only self loath, misery and loss of importance. Any positive emotion has been unlearned by the brain and any attempted at relearning them will feel fruitless. You're not feeling sorry for yourself but you're feeling sorry for everyone around you that has to put up with your shit. You feel bad because you don't deserve to be here since you're not doing any good for the world anyway and because of your current situation, you're becoming a burden to the ones who once loved you, but don't love you anymore. Of course they don't love you anymore. You don't love you anymore.

Now, with all of this in mind, how good of an idea do you think it is to tell a person standing on the edge of a roof top to "do better", "get over it", "get stronger", "don't be so weak", "You put yourself here"? And how possible would it be that the suicidal person is already thinking it?

How probable do you think it is that putting this person in a near death situation will suddenly change their mind and make them want to live?

How much of an impact do you think making them laugh once (if even possible at all) and then telling them to "smile more" will have on their life?

It would have the same impact as telling a person in a wheel chair to get up and walk it off.

Just like any physical illness, healing takes time. And in severe cases it can take a life time. It takes doctor visits, check ups, diagnosis, medicine, rehabilitation, work, love, support, motivation and all of this might still not be a permanent prevention of having suicidal tendencies. It's a never ending battle between life and death and you need a strong motivator to be willing to put up with such a long lasting fight under such unfavorable circumstances and not be tempted to just give up.

If you've made it this far into my review I want to know if any of these things that I have written about mental illness was communicated to you in any way through this drama.
- Did you realize the severity of the characters mental health issues and what they might be suffering from?
- Where you in anyway informed of how much treatment and work these characters are going to have to go through now that they survived their first suicide attempt?
- Were you presented with what that hard work and struggle might look like?
- Did they ever mention that having a diagnosis is okay?
- Did they ever encourage getting help from professionals?
- Did they ever validate that the people they saved were sick?
- Did you realize that the "bullies" were suffering from mental illness as well?

Personally, nothing I have listed here were things I felt like the drama communicated well.

And the reason I'm asking this is because this drama wasn't made for people suffering from sever mental illness. Those who are still trying to get treated don't want to relive their nightmares through other characters and then be invalidated because they still don't know how to handle things. The people who have gotten treatment don't need to be educated on what to do cause they're already aware of what they need. So the only audience left to influence are the people who either don't suffer from mental illness, or the ones who have untreated mental illness and aren't seeking help for it.

And for those people, I would never recommend watching this drama.